personal financing: how to record receiving of a gift (not fixed asset)

[Wouter van Marle]

> > The real question is: what are you trying to accomplish?  If you want to
> > record gifts of objects not carried as assets, then by all means make a
> > list in a file.  But pretending that such objects are assets when
> > received as gifts but not when you buy them seems odd and unwarranted.
> >
> >   
> Yes I wish to record gifts of objects not carried as assets. I probably 
> should keep it in a separate file, but I don't know what bad thing will 
> happen if I keep it in GnuCash? It's the most convenient and I don't see 
> the down side doing so. There is actually another upside: I can easily 
> get a sum of a friend's gifts through years as or not as assets; 
> otherwise I have to count the total of his gifts as assets in Gnu Cash, 
> and open "gift notes.txt"to sum the consumed gift together manually, to 
> get an impression how much I got from him in total.

It may be a typical Chinese thing to do (living in Hong Kong I know the
culture a bit): balancing gifts is an issue here. It is not in the West.
In this conversation I see a small cultural difference arise. Quite
interesting. But totally off-topic in this forum of course, but I think
it's worth pointing out.

Anyway, I would guess maybe a suitable way to handle this is to create a
liability account for those gifts. You receive the gift, which you could
treat as an income (record the cash value of the bottle in e.g.
Income:Gifts account), balancing it with a liability: you say basically
you owe this person a gift of similar value. Then later when you buy a
gift to that person you book the expense against that liability account
to keep the balance of gifts to and fro. And if necessary of course you
could create children accounts in your Liability:Gifts for the various
givers.

Issues that I see here are:
- this may influence your net worth (not sure if that is so, not going
to think that deep now),
- and as a result it may influence your tax calculation. But then
depending on your tax system and the actual value, gifts may actually
have to be booked as taxable income.

And finally if you would go for a separate file, why not use a
spreadsheet file, then you can have the tally calculated automatically.

Wouter.